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Data Centers

The Climate Change Science Institute has four major data centers within its Data Information, Dissemination, and Integration research theme. Collectively, the group curates more than 10,000 diverse environmental and climate datasets and many tools for their management, navigation, and analysis. These datasets are available to the world-wide research community

Atmospheric Radiation Measurements

The ARM Climate Research Facility, a DOE scientific user facility, provides the climate research community with strategically located in situ and remote sensing observatories designed to improve the understanding and representation, in climate and earth system models, of clouds and aerosols as well as their interactions and coupling with the Earth’s surface.

The Climate Change Science Institute has four major data centers within its Data Information, Dissemination, and Integration research theme. Collectively, the group curates more than 10,000 diverse environmental and climate datasets and many tools for their management, navigation, and analysis. These datasets are available to the world-wide research community.

Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments - Arctic

The mission of the NGEE-Arctic project is to improve climate model predictions through advanced understanding of coupled processes in Arctic terrestrial ecosystems. Increasing our confidence in climate projections for high-latitude regions of the world will require a coordinated set of investigations that target improved process understanding and model representation of important ecosystem-climate feedbacks. NGEE Arctic seeks to address this challenge by quantifying the physical, chemical, and biological behavior of terrestrial ecosystems in Alaska. Data sets are available at http://ngee-arctic.ornl.gov

Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments

The SPRUCE experiment is an experiment to assess the response of northern peatland ecosystems to increases in temperature and exposures to elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The experimental work in the 8.1-ha S1 bog is a climate change manipulation focusing on the combined responses to multiple levels of warming at ambient or elevated CO2 (eCO2) levels. Data sets are available at http://mnspruce.ornl.gov.

Free Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) Data Management System

The goal of the Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) project is to understand how forests will be affected by CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere and the feedbacks from the forest to the atmosphere. This goal is being approached by measuring the integrated response of an intact forest ecosystem, with a focus on stand-level mechanisms. These projects were part of the CO2 research network fostered by the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystemscore project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. Results from the experiment contribute to the Terrestrial Ecosystem Response to Atmospheric and Climatic Change (TERACC) project, a 5-year initiative integrating experimental data and global change modeling.

Distribute Active Archive Center for Biogeochemical Dynamics (DAAC)

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC) for Biogeochemical Dynamics is one of the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) data centers managed by the Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project, which is responsible for providing scientific and other users access to data from NASA's Earth Science Missions. The ORNL DAAC is responsible for data archival, product development and distribution, and user support for biogeochemical and ecological data and models.

Mercury is a set of tools for harvesting, searching, and retrieving metadata and data. Mercury harvests metadata and key data from contributing project servers distributed around the world and builds a centralized virtual index. The Mercury search interface provides a single portal to very quickly search for data and information contained in disparate data management systems, each of which may use different metadata formats. The search interface allows users to perform a variety of fielded, spatial, and temporal searches across these metadata sources. This centralized repository of metadata with distributed data sources provides extremely fast search results to the user, while allowing data providers to advertise and distribute their data and maintain complete control and ownership of that data. Mercury is developed and managed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is currently being funded by three federal agencies, including NASA, USGS and DOE. It provides access to more than 300,000 Bio-geo-chemical and ecological data; 30,000 scientists use it each month.

What are field campaigns?

The AmeriFlux network is a community of sites and scientists measuring ecosystem carbon, water, and energy fluxes across the Americas, and committed to producing and sharing high quality eddy covariance data.

The MODIS global subsetting and visualization tool provides customized subsets and visualizations of 13 MODIS Collection 5 land products on demand for any land area on Earth, from 1 pixel up to 201 x 201 km.

This ocean carbon data collection includes discrete and underway measurements from a variety of platforms (e.g., research ships, commercial ships, buoys). The measurements come from deep and shallow waters from all oceans.

This data set provides Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images for 42 selected sites from various terrestrial ecology and meteorological monitoring networks including FLUXNET, Ameriflux, Long Term Ecological Research (LTER), and the Greenland Climate Network (GC-Net).

DAAC Field Campaigns

What are field campaigns?

Field Campaigns combine ground-, aircraft-, and satellite-based measurements of biogeochemical features in specific ecosystems over multi-year time periods. These studies focus on a particular issue or set of issues and are critical to providing an integrated understanding of biogeochemical dynamics that can be extended across biomes and across both spatial and temporal scales.

The ORNL DAAC compiles, archives, and distributes more than 600 field campaign data products from the following NASA-funded research projects:

DAAC Land Validation Campaigns

What is land validation?

The goal of the EOS Validation Program is the comprehensive assessment of all EOS science data products. ORNL DAAC supports these assessments by compiling data such as leaf area index (LAI), and net primary productivity (NPP) for global test sites to compare with satellite-derived products. These data are unique in having ground-based observations coincident with satellite data. In addition, this information is useful to develop, calibrate, and validate ecosystem models.

The ORNL DAAC compiles, archives, and distributes more than 20 land validation data products from the following NASA-funded research projects:

Regional and Global Data

Regional and global biogeochemical dynamics data can be used to improve our understanding of the structure and function of various ecosystems; to enable prediction across spatial and temporal scales; and to parameterize and validate terrestrial ecosystem models. The ORNL DAAC compiles, archives, and distributes more than 150 products from these projects

DAAC Model Archive

DAAC Model Archive

The Model Archive provides the methodological detail in numerical modeling studies needed to ensure the long-term reproducibility of experimental results. Because numerical models evolve continuously over time, the most complete description of many numerical models is the specific version of the model itself used in a particular manuscript.

Current archived model products include:

Biogeochemical process models

Biosphere simulation models

Ecosystem process and response models

Land surface models

Scalable vegetation models

Other Data Centers

Other Data Centers

NOAA Climate.gov. Climate.gov, maintained by the National Oceanic and Air Administration (NOAA) is a source of timely and authoritative scientific data and information about climate. Its goals are to promote public understanding of climate science and climate-related events, to make data products and services easy to access and use, to provide climate-related support to the private sector and the Nation’s economy, and to serve people making climate-related decisions with tools and resources that help them answer specific questions.

EarthData. The Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) is a key core capability in NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program. It provides end-to-end capabilities for managing NASA’s Earth science data from various sources – satellites, aircraft, field measurements, and various other programs. For the EOS satellite missions, EOSDIS provides capabilities for command and control, scheduling, data capture and initial (Level 0) processing. These capabilities, constituting the EOSDIS Mission Operations, are managed by the Earth Science Mission Operations (ESMO) Project.

Earth System Grid Federation. The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) Peer-to-Peer (P2P) enterprise system is a collaboration that develops, deploys and maintains software infrastructure for the management, dissemination, and analysis of model output and observational data. ESGF's primary goal is to facilitate advancements in Earth System Science. It is an interagency and international effort led by the Department of Energy (DOE), and co-funded by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Science Foundation (NSF), and international laboratories such as the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ), the Australian National University (ANU) National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL), and the British Atmospheric Data Center (BADC).

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy